Social Innovation Fellow Salinee Tavaranan and the Border Green Energy Team are helping to bring light to some of the world’s darkest places. She and her team work on the border of her homeland, Thailand, and Burma, a country that’s been embroiled in civil war for over sixty years, to bring solar power to clinics and medical facilities that desperately need it.

The team is up against enormous challenges: in addition to the ongoing war, they struggle with lack of road access, transporting heavy equipment that needs to be hand-carried up and down mountains, and the general sense of uncertainty and danger inherent in working in the borderlands.

An emotional Tavaranan recounted perhaps the team’s biggest challenge: the loss of co-founder and “solar hero” Walt Ratterman to the Haitian earthquake, where he was finishing up a training session on solar technology.

Tavaran and her team are committed to continuing Ratterman’s good work: providing solar power to the places, like schools and hospitals, that need it most. She ended by asking the PopTech community to let her know if they could help.

Own Your Future is a collaborative project of the PopTech Accelerator and the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School (BCAM), a small public high school in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, run by founding principal and 2009 Social Innovation Fellow, James O’Brien. Through this program, students, including two youth ambassadors who attended this year’s conference, will receive year-long training in art, design, technology, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy to develop marketable products and skills.

This knowledge enables students to develop, market, and sell creative products and services. The money earned is then deposited into the students’ savings accounts and made available to them upon graduation — to help pay the way to college. Preparing BCAM students to become active members of the creative economy equips then with tools for the future and will hopefully become a replicable model.

They realized that the rough terrain and rundown streets around their home in the West Bank Al-Askar refugee camp made life difficult for a blind friend. So, they developed an electronic cane equipped with ground sensors which cause it to beep or vibrate when confronted by a hole or obstacle. Earlier this year, the four won a special award in applied enginering at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair — a first for any Palestinian representative.

Deborah Kenny, founder and chief executive of Harlem Village Academies, noticed Eugene when he showed up for the first day of school. Head down, making no eye contact, he walked past the teachers greeting the students and seemed to grumble to himself. Later that day, while the teachers were administering a test to determine students’ reading levels, Kenny saw that Eugene hadn’t even picked up his pencil. In fact, it seemed that he was tearing up. Only later did she find out that his response was due to his inability to read. At all. But without fail, every year he was moved up to the next grade.

Kenny invited Eugene’s mother to meet with her. His mother knew he’d be severely handicapped without learning how to read. And Eugene knew he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was in jail. Seven years later, as a result of his education at the Harlem Village Academy, he’s reading the Iliad, has taken the chemistry regents exam and is on his way to college. “We know what works,” Kenny said. “But do we have the political will to scale up?”

Kenny attributed the Harlem Village Academy’s success to bringing out passion in teachers: establishing a culture that gives them ownership over everything they do, creating a sense of team spirit, and developing a space where teachers learn from one another. Based on that approach, the school produces students who are wholesome in character, avid readers, sophisticated intellectually, independent thinkers, and most importantly, compassionate.

John Legend’s activism is deeply intertwined with his music. As he mentioned in his talk that led this morning’s PopTech session on Teaching & Learning, this juxtaposition has not been as common since singer/song-writers of the sixties. But it’s time, says Legend, to put the politics back into music — specifically in order to address a public education system that he describes as “completely broken”.

Legend had been working on his latest musical project called “Wake Up” with co-creators, the Roots. They wanted to include a video portion in the piece that explored the neighbors and people living and being educated in impoverished communities. As they started to research the project, they realized, serendipitously, that filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (who directed “An Inconvenient Truth”) was just putting the finishing touches on a documentary that covered the same topic: the film became Waiting for Superman

He closed his session by playing piano and singing two songs: the aforementioned “Wake Up”and a song from the film “Waiting for Superman” entitled “Let ’Em Shine.” This in an enormously important film, says Legend, who urged everyone in the room to see it. “Kids need to break the cycle of poverty,” says Legend, adding that right now we’re not giving low-income and minority kids a chance to succeed. “We, the adults, owe them that chance.”

Berg says that Africa needs to build its local technical capacity if its going to be able to locally, and sustainably, address the continent’s profound health issues. So, he helped create the Rural Technology Lab to train the continent’s first generation of programmers. They are learning to build community initiatives by leveraging the exploding popularity of mobile phones with technologies like RapidSMS.

With the help of this lab and the MillenniumVillages Project, Berg has created ChildCount+, a mobile-phone-based health platform. The project works with community health care workers to ensure that mothers and their children are part of community health systems. By using basic SMS messages, communities are able to register patients as well as track their health in a community patient registry. The pilot program has already registered more than 10,000 kids and 5,000 mothers.

OK Go closed Friday’s session with a brief talk about the current state of the music industry and how they’ve managed to succeed around it thanks to video, content-sharing and being able to put performance back into the musical experience. “Now that the music ‘industry’ has kind of imploded,” said Kulash, “videos no longer have to be ads. They can be more like art.”

The band played several acoustic songs, showed an amazing video starring a bunch of rescued dogs, got the crowd to sing along with them and rocked a lovely set of handbells. Here’s a little video of the bell song shot by a slightly over-caffeinated yours truly from the best seat in the house:

And just because it’s super cute, here’s a video of the slightly star-struck Kulash talking to Kermit the Frog about ping-pong and recording a cover of Muppet music.

The XTeam’s amazing run through the semi-finals brought the West Philadelphia High School students who make up the team, their teacher/coaches, and their mentor Simon Hauger much deserved attention and accolades (they even got props from President Obama).

And while winning the prize would have been awesome, the program’s real value is in the way it has changed team members’ educational experience.

Hauger and team co-captain Azeem Hill, a senior at West Philly, took the stage Saturday to share the XTeam story and offer insights they’ve gained over the years. Hauger, who came to teaching from a career in engineering, started the team as an afterschool project for students who wanted a hands-on science experience.

If there’s one thing PopTech attendees enjoy almost as much as connecting with one another, it’s reading. The intensity of the sessions, the opportunity to share ideas, and the sheer number of people you meet can be overwhelming during conference week. You find yourself in need of occasional solitary, quiet moments, wanting to take an even deeper dive into some of the things you’ve been learning.

Lucky for us, PopTech has an excellent, on-site at the Opera House, albeit temporary, bookstore. Set up and run especially for the conference by the good folks at local booksellers Owl & Turtle Bookshop, the store packs in a wide selection of books from PopTech presenters, attendees and community members both past and present.

We had a chance to chat with Joseph Barber, manager of the Owl & Turtle, in between his very brisk sales. Have a listen and find out who’s hot and what he’s been reading.